Mount Street Cemetery

 History of area

New Zealand Company director and mastermind Edward Gibbon Wakefield held ideas on organised colonisation that were underpinned by various principles, including a belief in the importance of religious freedom. When surveyor Captain Mein Smith of the New Zealand Company drew up a plan for the Town of Wellington in August 1840, he allocated land not only for housing, parks and roading – but also cemeteries. New Zealand’s first Catholic Bishop, Jean Pompallier, had estimated that a total of 200 Catholics, including both clergy and community, resided in Wellington by this time and there was a clear need for consecrated land in which they could be buried and a wish on their part that this occur in land specifically set aside for Catholics.[1] Captain Mein Smith allocated 7.3 hectares of land at Bolton Street as a cemetery for the Church of England, Jewish and other burials and he allocated a separate, smaller plot of land as the first Roman Catholic cemetery in Wellington.

The location was the hillside behind what later became known as The Terrace and it had a panoramic view of the harbour. The cemetery was consecrated by Bishop Pompallier on 6 January 1841. By the end of that year, Wellington’s Catholic community had erected a fence around the cemetery, followed in 1846 by a Presbytery for Wellington’s first Catholic Priest, Franciscan Father J.J.P. O’Reily, which was built within the perimeter. There was some initial confusion over the exact size of the cemetery, but the matter was settled by a Crown Grant on 27 July 1853, for an area of 1.16 hectares in trust to the Bishop Viard, Catholic Bishop of Wellington, and his successors.

The majority of burials in the cemetery occurred between 1841 and 1891. Many of Wellington’s founding Catholic clergy and settlers are buried in the cemetery, including early Marist fathers and Sisters of Mercy. Of note are the graves of Father O’Reily, and early French clerics Father Jean-Baptiste Petitjean, Father Augustine Sauzeau and Brother Jean-Francois Yvert. A number of Catholic soldiers from the 65^th Regiment are buried in the cemetery; their regiment arrived in the Hutt Valley in 1846 to take part in an operation against Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata, and several chose to retire from service and settled in the area. A boom in the number of people arriving in Wellington during the 1870s as a result of Premier Julius Vogel’s public works and immigration scheme included many Irish Catholic assisted immigrants. The Catholic pioneers and settlers buried at the cemetery speak to the variety of immigrants who arrived in Wellington during the 19^th century. There are Scots, Welsh, French, Italian, Austrian, German and Polish (and Maori) buried at Mount Street.

Despite the association with notable Wellingtonians, the cemetery soon earned a reputation as a ‘neglected wilderness’.Slips, roaming cattle, earthquake damage and flourishing undergrowth, combined with the absence of sufficient funds or a continuous caretaker, meant maintenance was an ongoing problem for the church. Despite the efforts of intermittent caretakers and periodic working bees, in 1883 the cemetery was described as ‘a standing disgrace…overrun as it is by fennel and weeds, which reach to the altitude of a man’s shoulder’. Roaming goats nibbled at flowers placed on the graves and fennel, gorse and dock grew with aggressive abandon around the headstones. It wasn’t always in such poor condition; some photographs of the cemetery show that it was intermittently well maintained, at least on the margins. In 1882, for instance, a working party of 100 parishioners worked on the land clearing undergrowth. 

Grave Yard Road (now McKenzie Terrace) was formed about 1895 on the cemetery’s eastern boundary. The very sharp cutting required for the road created a high bank that caused slips in poor weather. In 1896 parish priest Father Devoy asked the WCC to build a retaining wall to secure the bank, but nothing was done.

The cemetery was formally closed by an act of Parliament on 28 July 1891, although a small number of Catholics continued to be buried there until 1954 - mainly in family plots.The last known burial was Alice Frost, who died on 2 November 1954 aged 79. Unlike Wellington’s other early cemetery at Bolton Street which passed to the Wellington City Council after its closure in 1891, the Mount Street Cemetery remained in church control.

There were several efforts on the part of the Archdiocese to dispose of part – that which was not used for graves – or even all of the cemetery. In 1908 the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Wellington Empowering Act 1908 allowed the southern portion of the Cemetery to be leased and the proceeds went towards the upkeep of the remainder of the cemetery. When the church wanted to sell the land, another act was required. The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Wellington Empowering Act of 1926 allowed the unused southern half of the site to be sold for £3,000. It also allowed for the formation of Waiteata Road as an extension of McKenzie Terrace. A dispute ran on for the next five years as the Catholic Church, University and WCC negotiated the legality of an access way from Kelburn Parade to Salamanca Road, by way of Mount Street, that crossed over cemetery land. In 1936 this was declared a public access way.Throughout these negotiations the Church tried to persuade the WCC to take over upkeep of the cemetery in exchange for the land for the access way, but the Council declined. In 1941, the Church and University tried to persuade the WCC to turn the cemetery into a reserve and take over management, but nothing came of this either.

During this period, the Church employed a casual caretaker to maintain the cemetery at regular intervals, but his efforts were largely considered a waste of time. Archbishop O’Shea wanted a plan and a permanent arrangement to keep the cemetery in good order, but nothing was concluded.

In the 1950s the cemetery was identified as a potential source of land for Victoria University’s growing campus. In 1955 after the Reserves and Other Lands Act was passed, there was an exchange of land between the University, Church and WCC – with two lots vested in the University, and one in the WCC as an access way, but the Cemetery remained the responsibility of the Church.[18] In 1967 a plan to close the cemetery, reinter the remains and build a Catholic Hall of Residence on the site was approved by the Council in principal – but this eventually lapsed. By the late 1960s the cemetery had gained a reputation as a home to drug addicts and vandals – a reputation that led to the WCC undertaking a clean up in 1969. In the 1970s the University increasingly assumed maintenance responsibilities.[It cleared scrub and vegetation, mowed the lawns and undertook weed-eating as well as planting shrubs and small trees like pittosporums and agapanthus.

The Catholic Church still envisaged that the land would eventually be sold to the University. In 1991 the Church approached the University with a new plan; they would remove most of the monuments and sell the University a largely open site that it could use for the recreational benefit of its growing numbers of students. Negotiations were made public by the Dominion newspaper and the resulting public outcry led to the formation of the Friends of Mount Street Cemetery (FMSC) - a group seeking to ‘preserve, protect and develop the sacred, wooded and historic atmosphere of the Mount Street Cemetery in perpetuity for the benefit of all’. Faced with this opposition, and after consultation with Heritage New Zealand, the Catholic Archdiocese commissioned a conservation plan for the site. The first draft of the plan, prepared by Stephen Cashmore, was released in 1995.

In 1993 a designation for an eight metre road widening on the eastern boundary of the cemetery was uplifted by the Council. However, in 1994 the university made an application to the Council to have the road widening designation reinstated. Concerned by this development, FMSC successfully applied to become a Heritage Protection Authority, under Section 188 of the Resource Management Act of 1991 and in 1996 they placed a Heritage Order on the cemetery. That June, the University withdrew the application to have the roading designation reinstated.  

The WCC sought to have the Heritage Order withdrawn, but FMSC held firm. The following year, a variation to the District Plan (Variation 9), to extend the area under the Heritage Order to the cemetery’s McKenzie Terrace and Mount Street boundaries (by way of a buffer), was advertised by the WCC. In 1998 the buffer zones proposed under Variation 9 were formally confirmed.

A second edition of the conservation plan was prepared in 1998 and grants were provided by the Wellington City Council, the Lion Foundation and the New Zealand Lottery Grants Board to enable the Friends to undertake survey and repair work and look at the long-term conservation of the site. However, a lack of momentum saw the cemetery suffer again from a lack of regular tidying and maintenance.

In 2007, conservation architect Ian Bowman was retained to update the conservation plan, which was finalised in 2008. The state of the cemetery led to a group of concerned individuals reviving the FMSC in 2010. An active and dedicated committee gained the strong support of the Archbishop of Wellington John Dew and sought community funding, with considerable success. A grant of $6,000 came from the Lion Foundation for grave repairs. The WCC gave a grant of $2,160 for gradiometer survey to identify any graves under the path. More headstone repairs were undertaken after $10,000 grant was received from the Community Trust of Wellington. A further $5,000 from the Wellington City Council was provided for timber grave surrounds. A further grant of $8,890 was provided by the New Zealand Lottery Grants Board for a gradiometer survey of the entire Cemetery.

In November 2010, 200 people gathered at the Mount Street Cemetery to mark the 170th anniversary of the cemetery’s consecration by Bishop Pompallier.

Together with a significant amount of voluntary work by FMSC, the grants have enabled a significant improvement to the appearance and integrity of the cemetery and its contents.